Four-stages FAIR Roadmap - FAIR "Pyramid"

<p>On the basis of the experience of a community of practitioners, experts, engineers involved in the development of the EPOS Research Infrastructure, now with the ERIC status,&nbsp;involved in the ENVRI cluster and participating to the ENVRI-FAIR initiative, a common approach was observed, which is reflected into the re-organization FAIR principles into a four-stages roadmap which include: a) <em>data</em> stage, b) <em>metadata</em> stage, c) <em>access</em> stage and d) <em>use</em> stage.<br> These stages correspond to the actual conceptual approach driving day-to-day work of RI implementers in the solid Earth domain (EPOS).&nbsp;</p> <p>Data are usually the main business and wealth of scientists and data practitioners in RIs. As a consequence, the first conceptual step relates to data aspects (<em>Stage 1</em>).&nbsp;Once data is properly managed, RIs professional tend to conceptually tackle the challenge of data description and identification, in order to create the premises for data searchability and contextualization (<em>Stage 2</em>).&nbsp;Once data is properly managed, described and contextualized by means of metadata, then RIs practitioners approach the issue of making it accessible to users (<em>Stage 3</em>).&nbsp; In order to include&nbsp;functionalities that go beyond data access, for instance data analysis and processing, FAIR RIs and data stewardship systems should address a <em>fourth stage</em>&nbsp;concerned with services that <em>make use</em> of data (<em>Stage 1</em>) and metadata (<em>Stage 2</em>) FAIRly accessed (<em>Stage 3</em>) and produce new (meta)data as output.</p>